“As I say, let me get out of your hair. Call me upstairs if anything happens.”
John went up and told the secretary to cancel the day’s appointments. Then he sat at his desk and smoked.
How could a machine catch a psychosomatic disease from a human being? How could it be cured?
How could he tell anybody about it, without winding up in a soft room?
The phone rang and it was the machine room coordinator. The new output superconductor element had done exactly what the old one did. Rather than replace it right away, they were going to slave the machine into the big ConED/General computer, borrowing its output facilities and “diagnostic package.” If the biggest computer this side of Washington couldn’t find out what was wrong, they were in real trouble. John agreed. He hung up and turned the selector on his screen to the channel that came from ConEd/General
Why had the machine said “let me die”? When is a machine dead, for that matter? John supposed that you had to not only unplug it from its power source, but also erase all of its data and subroutines. Destroy its identity. So you couldn’t bring it back to life by simply plugging it back in. Why suicide? He remembered how he’d felt with the bottle of sleeping pills in his hand.
Sudden intuition: the machine had predicted their present court of action. It wanted to die because it had compassion, not only for humans, but for other machines. Once it was linked to ConEd/General, it would literally be part of the large machine. Curse and all. They would be back where they’d started, but on a much more profound level. What would happen to New York City?
He grabbed for the phone and the lights went out. All over.
The last bit of output that came from ConEd/General was an automatic signal requesting a link with the highly sophisticated diagnostic facility belonging to the largest computer in the United States: the IBMvac 2000 in Washington. The deadly infection followed, sliding down the East Coast on telephone wires.
The Washington computer likewise cried for help, bouncing a signal via satellite, to Geneva. Geneva linked to Moscow.
No less slowly, the curse percolated down to smaller computers, through routine information links to their big brothers. By the time John Zold picked up the dead phone, every general-purpose computer in the world was permanently rendered useless.
They could be rebuilt from the ground up; erased and then reprogrammed. But it would never be done. Because there were two very large computers left, specialized ones that had no empathy circuits and so were immune. They couldn’t have empathy circuits because their work was bloody murder, nuclear murder. One was under a mountain in Colorado Springs and the other was under a mountain near Sverdlosk. Either could survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb. Both of them constantly evaluated the world situation, in real time, and they both had the single function of deciding when the enemy was weak enough to make a nuclear victory probable. Each saw the enemy’s civilization grind to a sudden halt.
Two flocks of warheads crossed paths over the North Pacific.
A very old woman flicks her whip along the horse’s flanks, and the nag plods on, ignoring her. Her wagon is a 1982 Plymouth with the engine and transmission and all excess metal removed. It is hard to manipulate the whip through the side window. But the alternative would be to knock out the windshield and cut off the roof and she liked to be dry when it rained.
A young boy sits mutely beside her, staring out the window. He was born with the gadjo disease: his body is large and well-proportioned but his head is too small and of the wrong shape. She didn’t mind; all she wanted was someone strong and stupid, to care for her in her last years. He had cost only two chickens.
She is telling him a story, knowing that he doesn’t understand most of the words.
“… They call us gypsies because at one time it was convenient for us, that they should think we came from Egypt. But we come from nowhere and are going nowhere. They forgot their gods and worshipped their machines, and finally their machines turned on them. But we who valued the old ways, we survived.”
She turns the steering wheel to help the horse thread its way through the eight lanes of crumbling asphalt, around rusty piles of wrecked machines and the scattered bleached bones of people who thought they were going somewhere, the day John Zold was cured.
Tricentennial
I was a little bemused when this story won the Hugo Award (Best Short Story of 1976). Though it is one of my favorites, I’ve never done a story that was so thoroughly written to order.
Ben Bova called me up and asked if I’d like to do the cover story for the bicentennial issue of Analog. I would, indeed. He described the cover for me: a gorgeous Rick Sternbach painting of a spaceship in orbit around an alien world, with a red sun in the background. The North American Nebula—a shining cloud of gas shaped like the continent, in the constellation Cygnus—hangs in the sky (Sternbach is a great one for visual puns). Ben said he’d send me a copy of the painting immediately.
Well, the post office struck again; after several weeks, the painting hadn’t arrived. I started the story without it, working from notes I’d scribbled during the telephone conversation. It’s a good thing I didn’t try to finish without it.
The picture arrived and, lo, the spaceship had a hole in it. Repair crews were crawling around on it. Have to write that into the story. But wait. A spaceship going from star to star is going too fast to hit anything. Even a Ping-Pong ball demolish it.* So the damage has to be done either at the beginning or end of the journey.
Now, how long is that journey? Easy to find out, I can find out how far away the North American Nebula is, and how big it looks from Earth, then measure the apparent angular size of it in the picture. Do a little trigonometric tap dance and … we got problems. They’ve gone three thousand light years.
The starship on the cover painting is of the Daedelus design: it propels itself by the crude expedient of tossing H-bombs out behind and letting the blask kick it along. It just can’t go that far, not in any reasonable time. (I hasten to point out that none of this is Sternbach’s fault. He was well within the limits of artistic license, and the picture is breathtakingly accurate on its own terms—which is Sternbach’s norm.)
Well, I pushed the damned story through hoops, but finally fixed everything. Unfortunately, the art director of the magazine thought the painting looked better upside down, and printed it that way, which made the North American Nebula unrecognizable. So I went through all that work for the one reader in ten thousand who learned how to read by standing in front of Granny while she recited from the Bible, and so always holds his magazines upside down.
Was it worth it? Yes, emphatically; it always is. Not because of the letters I get when I make a mistake—and I get some angry ones—but for two powerful and subtle reasons that have nothing to do with scientific accuracy. We’ll talk about them in the afterword.
* You want to know what a science fiction writer goes through? That line cost me ten minutes of tracking down formulae and conversion factors. It goes like this: a reasonable approximation for the kinetic energy of an object moving close to the speed of light is K = ½mv2 + 3mv4/8c2. Say a Ping-Pong ball weighs 5 grams (about 1/5 ounce, just guessing). Say the ship is going at nine-tenths the speed of light. Plug those numbers in—thank God for Texas Instruments—and you get 2.93 x 1014 joules, which is equivalent to some 73,000 tons of TNT. Put that in your starship and smoke it!
December 1975
Scientists pointed out that the Sun could be part of a double star system. For its companion to have gone undetected, of course, it would have to be small and dim, and thousands of astronomical units distant.
They would find it eventually; “it” would turn out to be “them”; they would come in handy.
January 2075
The office was opulent even by the extravagant standards of 21st century Washington. Senator Connors had a passion for antiques. One wall was lined with leatherbound books; a large brass telescope symbolized his role as Liaison to th
e Science Guild. An intricately woven Navajo rug from his home state covered most of the parquet floor. A grandfather clock. Paintings, old maps.
The computer terminal was discreetly hidden in the top drawer of his heavy teak desk. On the desk: a blotter, a precisely centered fountain pen set, and a century-old sound-only black Bell telephone. It chimed.
His secretary said that Dr. Leventhal was waiting to see him. “Keep answering me for thirty seconds,” the Senator said. “Then hang it and send him right in.”
He cradled the phone and went to a wall mirror. Straightened his tie and cape; then with a fingernail evened out the bottom line of his lip pomade. Ran a hand through long, thinning white hair and returned to stand by the desk, one hand on the phone.
The heavy door whispered open. A short thin man bowed slightly. “Sire.”
The Senator crossed to him with both hands out. “Oh, blow that, Charlie. Give ten.” The man took both his hands, only for an instant. “When was I ever ‘Sire’ to you, heyfool?”
“Since last week,” Leventhal said. “Guild members have been calling you worse names than ‘Sire.’”
The Senator bobbed his head twice. “True, and true. And I sympathize. Will of the people, though.”
“Sure.” Leventhal pronounced it as one word: “Willathapeeble.”
Connors went to the bookcase and opened a chased panel. “Drink?”
“Yeah, Bo.” Charlie sighed and lowered himself into a deep sofa. “Hit me. Sherry or something.”
The Senator brought the drinks and sat down beside Charlie. “You shoulda listened to me. Shoulda got the Ad Guild to write your proposal.”
“We have good writers.”
“Begging to differ. Less than two percent of the electorate bothered to vote; most of them for the administration advocate. Now you take the Engineering Guild—”
“You take the engineers. And—”
“They used the Ad Guild,” Connors shrugged. “They got their budget.”
“It’s easy to sell bridges and power plants and shuttles. Hard to sell pure science.”
“The more reason for you to—”
“Yeah, sure. Ask for double and give half to the Ad boys. Maybe next year. That’s not what I came to talk about.”
“That radio stuff?”
“Right. Did you read the report?”
Connors looked into his glass. “Charlie, you know I don’t have time to—”
“Somebody read it, though.”
“Oh, righty-o. Good astronomy boy on my staff; he gave me a boil-down. Mighty interesting, that.”
“There’s an intelligent civilization eleven light-years away—that’s ‘mighty interesting’?”
“Sure. Real breakthrough.” Uncomfortable silence. “Uh, what are you going to do about it?”
“Two things. First, we’re trying to figure out what they’re saying. That’s hard. Second, we want to send a message back. That’s easy. And that’s where you come in.”
The Senator nodded and looked somewhat wary.
“Let me explain. We’ve sent messages to this star, 61 Cygni, before. It’s a double star, actually, with a dark companion.”
“Like us.”
“Sort of. Anyhow, they never answered. They aren’t listening, evidently; they aren’t sending.”
“But we got—”
“What we’re picking up is about what you’d pick up eleven light-years from Earth. A confused jumble of broadcasts, eleven years old. Very faint. But obviously not generated by any sort of natural source.”
“Then we’re already sending a message back. The same kind they’re sending us.”
“That’s right, but—”
“So what does all this have to do with me?”
“Bo, we don’t want to whisper at them-we want to shout! Get their attention.” Leventhal sipped his wine and leaned back. “For that we’ll need one hell of a lot of power.”
“Uh, righty-o. Charlie, power’s money. How much are you talking about?”
“The whole show. I want to shut down Death Valley for twelve hours.”
The Senator’s mouth made a silent O. “Charlie, you’ve been working too hard. Another Blackout? On purpose?”
“There won’t be any Blackout. Death Valley has emergency storage for fourteen hours.”
“At half capacity.” He drained his glass and walked back to the bar, shaking his head. “First you say you want power. Then you say you want to turn off the power.” He came back with the burlap-covered bottle. “You aren’t making sense, boy.”
“Not turn it off, really. Turn it around.”
“Is that a riddle?”
“No, look. You know the power doesn’t really come from the Death Valley grid; it’s just a way station and accumulator. Power comes from the orbital—”
“I know all that, Charlie. I’ve got a Science Certificate.”
“Sure. So what we’ve got is a big microwave laser in orbit, that shoots down a tight beam of power. Enough to keep North America running. Enough—”
“That’s what I mean. You can’t just—”
“So we turn it around and shoot it at a power grid on the Moon. Relay the power around to the big radio dish at Farside. Turn it into radio waves and point it at 61 Cygni. Give ’em a blast that’ll fry their fillings.”
“Doesn’t sound neighborly.”
“It wouldn’t actually be that powerful—but it would be a hell of a lot more powerful than any natural 21-centimeter source.”
“I don’t know, boy.” He rubbed his eyes and grimaced. “I could maybe do it on the sly, only tell a few people what’s on. But that’d only work for a few minutes … what do you need twelve hours for, anyway?”
“Well, the thing won’t aim itself at the Moon automatically, the way it does at Death Valley. Figure as much as an hour to get the thing turned around and aimed.
“Then, we don’t want to just send a blast of radio waves at them. We’ve got a five-hour program, that first builds up a mutual language, then tells them about us, and finally asks them some questions. We want to send it twice.”
Connors refilled both glasses. “How old were you in ’47, Charlie?”
“I was born in ’45.”
“You don’t remember the Blackout. Ten thousand people died … and you want me to suggest—”
“Come on, Bo, it’s not the same thing. We know the accumulators work now—besides, the ones who died, most of them had faulty fail-safes on their cars. If we warn them the power’s going to drop, they’ll check their fail-safes or damn well stay out of the air.”
“And the media? They’d have to take turns broadcasting. Are you going to tell the People what they can watch?”
“Fuzz the media. They’ll be getting the biggest story since the Crucifixion.”
“Maybe.” Connors took a cigarette and pushed the box toward Charlie. “You don’t remember what happened to the Senators from California in ’47, do you?”
“Nothing good, I suppose.”
“No, indeed. They were impeached. Lucky they weren’t lynched. Even though the real trouble was ’way up in orbit.
“Like you say; people pay a grid tax to California. They think the power comes from California. If something fuzzes up, they get pissed at California. I’m the Lib Senator from California, Charlie; ask me for the Moon, maybe I can do something. Don’t ask me to fuzz around with Death Valley.”
“All right, all right. It’s not like I was asking you to wire it for me, Bo. Just get it on the ballot. We’ll do everything we can to educate—”
“Won’t work. You barely got the Scylla probe voted in—and that was no skin off nobody, not with L-5 picking up the tab.”
“Just get it on the ballot.”
“We’ll see. I’ve got a quota, you know that. And the Tricentennial coming up, hell, everybody wants on the ballot.”
“Please, Bo. This is bigger than that. This is bigger than anything. Get it on the ballot.”
“May
be as a rider. No promises.”
March 1992
From Fax & Pix, 12 March 1992:
ANTIQUE SPACEPROBE
ZAPPED BY NEW STARS
1. Pioneer 10 sent first Jupiter pix Earthward in 1973 (see pix upleft, upright).
2. Left solar system 1987. First man-made thing to leave solar system.
3. Yesterday, reports NSA, Pioneer 10 begins AM to pick up heavy radiation. Gets more and more to max about 3 PM. Then goes back down. Radiation has to come from outside solar system.
4. NSA and Hawaii scientists say Pioneer 10 went through disk of synchrotron (sin-kro-tron) radiation that comes from two stars we didn’t know about before.
The stars are small “black dwarfs.”
They are going round each other once very 40 seconds, and take 350,000 years to go around the Sun.
One of the stars is made of antimatter. This is stuff that blows up if it touches real matter. What the Hawaii scientists saw was a dim circle of invisible (infrared) light, that blinks on and off every twenty seconds. This light comes from where the atmospheres of the two stars touch (see pic downleft).
The stars have a big magnetic field. Radiation comes from stuff spinning off the stars and trying to get through the field.
The stars are about 5000 times as far away from the Sun as we are. They sit at the wrong angle, compared to the rest of the solar system (see pic down-right).
5. NSA says we aren’t in any danger from the stars. They’re too far away, and besides, nothing in the solar system ever goes through the radiation.
6. The woman who discovered the stars wants to call them Scylla (skill-a) and Charybdis (ku-rib-dus).
7. Scientists say they don’t know where the hell those two stars came from. Everything else in the solar system makes sense.
February 2075
When the docking phase started, Charlie thought, that was when it was easy to tell the scientists from the baggage. The scientists were the ones who looked nervous.